Goodbye to Michaela

 

Astute readers may have noticed that I didn't blog yesterday. There is a good reason for that - I went to Luxuli and Prairie Man's house with Travalon to say goodbye to our frequent houseguest. Jilly Moose was there too, and Rich stopped by earlier in the day. Poor Michaela was thirteen and not feeling at all well, but we did have a good visit with her. This morning the plan was that she would peacefully enter the next realm. All my condolences to Luxuli and Prairie Man, and if they want to write an obituary, I'd be happy to post it. Here is one final photo of her with me - she looks better than I do, and I'm not the sick one.

This morning I had a meeting of a committee to decide who would be awarded employee excellence awards (I have never been nominated myself), then we had our weekly department admin meeting. Apparently there is a secret room in one of the grad student offices that my coworker just discovered, and nobody seems to have a key for it, but our boss said he and the other coworker and three grad students made a pact that they would share any treasure hidden in there. I just think the Killer Building is so bizarre - this is not the only room within a room in it.

It was a very cold day, so at lunch I walked around in the Botany greenhouses. There are a number of them, including a desert one, but today I enjoyed the fern one so much that I went in it twice. It was so hot and humid in there, I just loved it. And look how green it is!

It makes me happy just to look at it. 

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Back to Reality

 

Yesterday I half-passed my "get up early" drill: I got up in time to go to 9 am Mass, but I didn't get going fast enough to go downtown, so we went to the closest church. Then we met the usual brunch crowd at the Inn on the Park before Travalon and I went down to the Lakeshore Path to try to take pictures of the bird I keep seeing. It's a large diving bird with a white neck, and I thought it was a loon with winter colors, but a more serious birder said it's a red-necked grebe, which is even cooler. I had my binoculars and Travalon had his good camera, so we thought we could get a better view of the bird, but we never saw it. We saw buffleheads, coots, and mallards, but the water was very choppy. We did go to the ciiporoke. It was cold, so we went to the conservatory at Olbrich to warm up with the tropical plants. Then we went home and watched the Packers lose to the Eagles in Philly, which I was expecting, but I didn't expect them to fight so hard. Maybe if they had played like that against a team that isn't top of the NFL, they might have won. The first drive was awful, with the punt returner running out what could have been a touchback and then only getting five yards, and then Rodgers threw an interception. Toward the end Rodgers got hurt, so they finally put Jordan Love in, and he looked really good. I'd like to see him start in a game.

I forgot to mention that on Saturday we had lunch at a place called something like "Eat Good Pizza." It really was good pizza, so the name was apt. It's under the University Bookstore.

Today was brutal, having to get up early and work a whole day after four days of sleeping in and then doing whatever I wanted. On my lunchtime walk I saw not just one but two of those large diving birds. I feel a bit like Fred and Barney on The Flintstones, when they can see the Great Gazoo but nobody else can.  These birds really do exist! 

Here are some recent photos. First, here is what Travalon gets paid to do:

I guess we can add "architect" to his overblown bio from a few posts back. Not only that, but as a college basketball player, he played in two Final Fours! They were not the NCAA Final Four, of course, but a state tournament for small colleges and a Midwestern regional tournament.

Here are buffleheads that we saw yesterday.

More photos of the ciiporoke.

And here are a couple of photos of animals at the zoo that Travalon took during Today Fest:

Tomorrow I hope to post photos from Olbrich Gardens, so there's that to look forward to.

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The Dreaded Doink

 

Travalon and I had yet another relaxing morning - that's three in a row, for those of you keeping track at home. It's going to be really tough getting up early and going to work on Monday, so tomorrow I'll have a practice run of getting up a little less early to go to Mass. This one will be less high stakes because if I fail, I just go to a later Mass. If I fail on Monday, I may not get a paycheck anymore. 

Eventually we got going and headed downtown for Travalon's favorite day of the year: Small Business Saturday! I always consider it part of his birthday festivities. Speaking of birthdays, I have already given him his present:

A Hamm's Bear hoodie! And here he is with his two stuffed Hamm's bears.

This is the time of year on Famous Hat when I post lots of photos of Christmas lights. Last night Travalon missed the turn onto Johnson Street on our way home from the concert, so we went up Langdon Street and got to see the lights at the Edgewater Hotel.

Another thing I forgot to mention about yesterday is that during the cave tour, at one point they turned off all the lights so we were in total darkness. A kid (not the Spawn of Satan) snuggled up against me, and I don't know if he thought I was his mom in the dark, or if I was just a comforting presence. He didn't seem horrified when the lights came back up that he was snuggled up to some strange adult. 

Travalon and I went up State Street toward the campus, then we took the Holiday Trolley back toward the Capitol and went around it. Here are some of the treasures I got:

The blue apatite is actually from yesterday at the Cave of the Mounds. The little mushroom, pyramid, tetrahedron, and triskelion are from Mimosa, the necklace and earrings (I see one of them got flipped upside-down) are from Art Gecko, and the two soaps are from the Soap Opera. Then here are some more treasures:

These are from Little Luxuries, except for the chocolate lime bar, which is from Madison Modern Market. I just laughed so hard when I saw the cooking mitt that Travalon said we should get it.

Then we drove to Oconomowoc to go to the German Christmas Market, which was extremely packed. We had some apple strudel and a giant Bavarian pretzel, then of course the stand that interested me the most sold Irish stuff. Travalon bought me this ring for an early birthday present:

I liked the way this person decorated their windows. This looks like condos - there are so many condos going up in Oconomowoc that people are calling it O-condo-mowoc. 

Right when we got to Oconomowoc, we parked by the railroad tracks, and just then the fastest freight train I've ever seen blew by. When we got back to the car, the same thing happened! Only it was going the other direction, and suddenly it slowed down and stopped on the tracks. Luckily we didn't have to go that way.

Here's something exciting: Tiffy's niece had a pattern for a hat that she created published in a knitting magazine called Pom Pom! Here the model (not the niece) is modeling the hat.

The niece's name was on the front cover and everything. That is more impressive than my poem (allegedly) being published on the side of a bus, since neither I nor anyone else I know ever saw it on a bus. If I was better at knitting, I'd try to make this hat, but with brighter colors. It's very cute.

On the way home, Travalon and I listened to the Badgers play the Gophers on the radio. The Badgers were ahead, but then the Gophers tied it up and got up by a touchdown. There was little time left, and the Gophers intercepted the ball and were about to kick a field goal. I said that the Badgers had no chance unless the guy missed the field goal and then the Badgers got a touchdown to throw things into overtime, but it could happen. The Gopher kicker did miss! The announcer said, "There it is - the dreaded doink," because the ball made that sound as it bounced off the right upright, and I said, "There's my blog post title." Then the Badger's kind of useless quarterback got injured, so with less than two minutes left the backup QB came out and got them down to the five-yard line... and then three times in a row they jumped offsides, so it was third and thirty, and the QB got the ball into the end zone but nobody caught it. So now the Gophers have the Paul Bunyan axe. Maybe they kept it; I have a vague memory that they beat us last year too. This is just not the year for Wisconsin football, but the Badgers do have a good enough record to limp into some minor bowl. Maybe the Toilet Bowl?

I got an exciting thing in the mail the other day: my Advent calendar! When I was a kid, I always wanted one of those Advent calendars where you would open a window for each day and get a chocolate, but Pa Hat said, "No, that's not the spirit of Advent!" We had a big, felt Advent calendar that you could put the numbers for each date on. I have since had the chocolate Advent calendars (I work at the German Department, so some professor tends to give them out), and they're not that exciting (not the best chocolate), but I got an email with almost the perfect Advent calendar for sale from National Geographic: each day you open a window and get a small crystal! The only better one (but it would be prohibitively large) would be if each day you got a different Latin percussion instrument. So tonight is the beginning of Advent, and so I looked at the calendar (since I'm too lazy to put up the wreath - tomorrow is soon enough), and it starts on December 1. That's not actually the start of Advent, but I guess that's what you get when you buy Advent calendars from non-religious folks. Lesson learned.

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Cave of the Mounds Black Light Tour

 

Today Travalon and I had a very relaxing morning, then we went for a hike on Picnic Point. It was an incredibly beautiful day, sunny and in the 50's. We saw lots of coots.

We saw David Buoy, which marks the deepest point of the lake.

We saw the skyline with the Capitol building.

And did I mention lots of coots?

Also, this carved tree stump that was happy to see us.

Then we drove to Cave of the Mounds to take a black light tour, which was incredibly cool and beautiful. Here are some photos.

This formation glowed even after we took our lights off of it.

I took this photo with my cell phone camera.

There were some children on the tour, and their colorful shoes glowed under the black lights. There was a demon child too. He appeared to be an only child, and he was totally out of control. He screamed and ranted and did everything his parents asked him not to, and once we were in the cave he demanded to get out of it and kept shining his black light in his dad's eyes just like he was told not to. Is that bad parenting, bad diet, or what? He was enough to scare people sterile!

After that Travalon dropped me off at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church for an early music concert, and he went to Leopold's and then checked out some other places on Monroe Street for the next time we do Today Fest. I really enjoyed the concert, which had a lot of little-known composers featured, but the works by Handel and Telemann were much more engaging. There's a reason they're better known.

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